The unprecedented growth of social technologies has redefined the way people connect and communicate. In social environments, on-line social networks such as Facebook™, Pinterest™, Tumblr™, Google+™, Hootsuite™, and Twitter™ have forever changed the way people share information with each other. In business environments, enterprise social network platforms such as Chatter™, released in June 2010 by Salesforce™ and available at www.salesforce.com, have revolutionized the way people collaborate with each other in pursuing business opportunities. Chatter users track projects and sales opportunities by receiving broadcast updates about coworkers, files, and other project related data objects. Users can also form groups and post messages on each other's profiles to facilitate collaboration.
In addition, the explosion of mobile computing technologies has driven business practices to become increasingly ubiquitous through the use of virtual offices leveraging tablets, laptops, and iPhone™ and Android™ handsets across multiple operating systems.
At the same time, software development is evolving away from the client-server model toward network-based processing systems that provide access to data and services via the Internet or other networks. In contrast to traditional systems that host networked applications on dedicated server hardware, a “cloud” computing model allows applications to be provided over the network “as a service” supplied by an infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider typically abstracts the underlying hardware and other resources used to deliver a customer-developed application so that the customer no longer needs to operate and support dedicated server hardware. The cloud computing model can often provide substantial cost savings to the customer over the life of the application because the customer no longer needs to provide dedicated network infrastructure, electrical and temperature controls, physical security and other logistics in support of dedicated server hardware.
Multi-tenant cloud-based architectures have been developed to improve collaboration, integration, and community-based cooperation between customer tenants without sacrificing data security. Generally speaking, multi-tenancy refers to a system where a single hardware and software platform simultaneously supports multiple user groups (also referred to as “organizations” or “tenants”) from a common data storage element (also referred to as a “multi-tenant database”). The multi-tenant design provides a number of advantages over conventional server virtualization systems. First, the multi-tenant platform operator can often make improvements to the platform based upon collective information from the entire tenant community. Additionally, because all users in the multi-tenant environment execute applications within a common processing space, it is relatively easy to grant or deny access to specific sets of data for any user within the multi-tenant platform, thereby improving collaboration and integration between applications and the data managed by the various applications. The multi-tenant architecture therefore allows convenient and cost effective sharing of similar application features between multiple sets of users.
Presently known methods for synchronizing data objects across multiple users and/or devices include the Dropbox™ file hosting system available at www.dropbox.com. Such systems typically involve manually updating the file, either locally or through a web-based interface to a service cloud where the file is maintained, and manually uploading the updated file to the service cloud. The updated file may then be shared with other users and devices. However, manual file synchronization and sharing can be cumbersome, time consuming, and error prone.
Systems and methods are thus needed for automatically synchronizing data objects with a social network service cloud, and for automatically and seamlessly sharing the updated files among pre-configured users, devices, and groups within an enterprise network.